“Cycling from Park Slope to the Columbia Street Waterfront District is about to get a whole lot easier.

Community Board 6 voted unanimously to approve a city plan to roll out a path for two-wheelers on Sackett Street that would connect to an existing Park Slope route and cross the Gowanus Canal on Union Street — giving bikers a safer ride from the brownstone enclave to Van Brunt Street.”

In the Netherlands polders and dikes and the reshaping of the land can be looked to as a good lesson in water management.

In order for something like this to occur difficult political decisions need to be made, but we see it as the only option in order to cope with rising sea level and storm surge. Protecting the neighborhood and the city should not be treated as a burden, but “as an economic and architectural opportunity.”

After natural disasters there is a flurry of media coverage and assistance that flood into an affected area. But what happens when the headlines fade as time passes?
Peter Day takes a walk down Van Brunt Street of Red Hook Brooklyn to find out how businesses in this one area are trying to rebuild themselves after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy.

In this 2010 proposal in response to a study prompted by the Economic Development Corporation (EDC), a collaboration between Kiss + Cathcart Architects & Starr Whitehouse Landscape Architects looked at ways to improve the BQE underpass. The issues highest on the agenda were developing east-west access over the underpass and controlling noise and pollution emanating from the depressed highway. The scheme suggests the possibility of removing the highway from view at street level, generating electricity for the surrounding area, and even an opportunity for new retail space. A list of related documents can be found here, on the EDC's website.